'Aids nurses tortured in jail'
2006-05-17 12:20
Sofia - A Bulgarian engineer arrested in Libya in 1999 with five nurses and a Palestinian doctor, now on retrial for "knowingly" injecting Libyan children with Aids-contaminated blood, said on Wednesday that he saw the six tortured in detention.
Smilian Tachev said: "The nurses were beaten with many-stranded wire, for a long time and painfully.
"Then they were made to run, crawl, stand on one leg with their hands stretched up. When they collapsed totally, they were dragged somewhere and brought back in a helpless state."
Captors 'set dogs on me'
Defence lawyer Othman al-Bizanti said that Tachev spent 174 days in detention in Libya before being released in May 2000, but a Libyan court brought last Thursday new in absentia accusations against him and another Bulgarian, Emanuela Koleva, for the alleged consumption of alcohol in public.
One of the nurses told Tachev that her captors set dogs on her and brought a lighted cigarette close to her eyes before removing it in the last second.
Another was force-fed with a probe, while tied on a chair, and later told him they had tortured her with electric shocks.
Tachev said that still another could not move her hands to feed herself and screamed frantically every time they closed the door of her cell.
53 injected kids died
The nurses and the doctor were sentenced to death on May 6 2004 by a court in Benghazi, northeastern Libya, on charges of having knowingly injected at least 426 children with Aids-contaminated blood at a local hospital.
Fifty-three of the children had since died.
The nurses maintained their innocence on the basis of testimony by foreign experts, who said the Aids epidemic was caused by poor hygiene long before the medics' arrival at the hospital.
Two of them and the doctor testified. Tripoli's Supreme Court quashed the death sentences last December, citing "procedural flaws" and a retrial officially opened on Thursday, but was almost immediately adjourned till June 13.
Bulgaria warned against new delays in the long-running case as the nurses had already been held for seven years in a Libyan prison.